Machine Metabolism

Project Members: David Alan Hjelle, Daniel Lobo, Franz Nigl, Eric Schweikardt, Shuguang Li

Biological organisms can metabolize: break down nutrients into basic building blocks and then use those building blocks to create new things. What if we could reproduce this kind of process in a robotic system?

This would allow many useful properties for engineering and manufacturing:

• Perfect reuse and recycling of modular elements from one object into another.
• Adaptation and robustness to fluctuations in resource availability.
• Self-repair.
• Autonomous design satisfying given functional requirements for the system.

Ultimately, we hope that such work can provide insights into the art and science of design, the process of creativity, and biological metabolism. We also aim for wide-ranging practical applications, in areas as diverse as disaster recovery, design engineering, and space exploration.

We are currently exploring these ideas in several areas. First, we are designing and constructing a robot testbed capable of reconfiguring simple truss structures, as shown in the concept image on the left. Second, we work on devising genetic algorithms that are capable of performing reconfigurations of these such structures to fulfill given functional requirements. Finally, we hope to expand this work into larger fields of exploration: kinematic structures, automated design, and more.

Publications

Lobo, D., Hjelle, D. A., Lipson, H., (2009) "Reconfiguration Algorithms for Robotically Manipulatable Structures," In Proceedings of ASME/IFToMM International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots (ReMAR 2009), June 2009

Hjelle, D. A., Lipson, H., (2009) "A Robotically Reconfigurable Truss," In Proceedings of ASME/IFToMM International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots (ReMAR 2009), June 2009.